About
Home Video Cost answers one question for anyone with a box of old tapes or film reels: what will it cost to get them onto a computer, and which way is cheapest for what you have? Services price by the tape, by the half hour, by the box or by the foot, and most run a code or a sale, so we put them on the same footing: the total for your box, with the files and the shipping.
What's covered
Eight US digitizing services that publish their prices: iMemories, Southtree, Legacybox, Kodak Digitizing, ScanDigital, Larsen Digital, DVD Your Memories, Walgreens. Each has its own page, and the comparison and calculator put them side by side. For doing it yourself, three capture devices with a price at their maker's store and the free software to record with; for making the result look better, 8 restoration programs, two of them free.
Where the numbers come from
Every price comes from the seller's own pages. 131 passages of those pages are saved word for word as evidence, and every number on the site cites one of them: a test run with every build checks that each figure is in the passage it cites, so a figure that doesn't match its source stops the build rather than reaching a page.
How current it is
The prices were read on . Every day a script re-reads 25 of these pages and flags any quoted price that changed; every page still shows the date its figures were read.
What we don't do
- No service pays to be listed or for its position. Lists run cheapest first, worked out from the prices alone.
- No programme has accepted the site yet, so today no link here earns anything.
- No star ratings and no claims about using a service or a program: what's here is what the sellers publish, costed.
- No guessed prices. Where a part of the bill isn't published, the total says "at least", and where the pages don't give enough to price an order, there is no total.
Corrections
There is no contact address yet; it will appear here and in the footer when there is. A figure only changes to what the seller's own page says, and each change and correction is dated in the change log.
Prices checked against each service's own pages on .